With this, Safari will apply the background color of the a:hover style also to the image which is inline the <a> tag. You'll notice the background being applied to the right and bottom of the image which looks real ugly.

IE5 Mac renders this much better. See below:

Safari

IE 5

Update:
this seems to have been more a case of Safari not going into Quirks-Mode on my testcase and thus displaying the page as it did.
The FIX for this is easy. Use: "display: block;" for the image tag (has side effects often unwanted) in your css or style="background-color:transparent; inline the a tag.

2

If you have a minute can you look at this site. Have a look at the "How we do it page" and the What we do page. Both have been created in Dreamweaver on MAC OSX. They were copied and from what I can see look identical. But the both IE and Safari show one page moved over about 2 pixels.

3

Basically in strict mode, Safari and Mozilla will not clip out the descent underneath an image. This is correct according to the standards, and is the reason both Safari and Mozilla added "almost strict" mode.